I agree with the keyboard observation and the keyboard looks a little flat like the OG. I'm also curious to see the screen and how it performs. Last concern is about worldwide capabilities. It appears to have the "right stuff," the question is will Verizon enable it or lock it down like it appears it did with the Razr. I'll also want to demo a live unit vefore amking a decision as to whether this is my next 'Droid.

I hate the fact they changed layout from D3. Especially alt and shift keys. D3 keyboard so far is the best ever keyboard I've used except maybe Nokia E90's..
The flashy border light thing isn't apealing to me either. Prefer the way it was on previous Droids.
Screen is another point of concern. They really need to put pentile technology aside, especially if we are talking pixel density less than 300 ppi. RAZR's screen is improvement over D3 in many aspects, but still looks fuzzier than classic RGB stripe matrix displays with mych lower res.
D4 spec says TFT screen, which means it's not AMOLED like RAZR's. But if they used the same screen from D3, it will be a big FAIL!

OK. I think I'm starting to be able to piece together this battery puzzle. True polymer batteries are super, except they have to stay really hot to work well. The RAZR & D4 will use a foil pouch Lithium-hybrid polymer design. As such it has no significant performance advantage over regular Lithium ion batteries. What makes it useful in a handheld device is that it can be made really skinny. Since the hybrid battery is soft, you can break it. That's one reason to lock it away. Another reason is that polymer hybrid Li-ion batteries are more prone to gassing, so Motorola may have felt that double covers would better resist its ballooning tendencies. However, nobody wants a battery you can't replace yourself, especially since Lithium batteries are known to start to degrade after a year or so, even if not in use. So we get a key and instructions on how to - carefully! - install a new battery when the original gets too weak. That new battery may be expensive since it's a new technology in low production.
Essentially, this is all being done just to make the phone a tad (0.2mm or 1.55% v. D3) skinnier. There is no other performance benefit to the user. And you lose the ability to "just pull the battery" to reset the phone when it freezes,up, gets loopy aftet a minor spill, or if you're stuck trying to root it.

My biggest gripes:
a.) no ICS at launch
b.) MotoBLUR
c.) can't tell from the leaked shots but the rear panel looks like it may be a textured plastic instead of metal? Hopefully this isn't the case though.

As long as the D4 has a hard button reset functionality, the non-removable battery shouldn't be an issue for me since I never got in the habit of using spare batteries.

In the big scheme of things though, this is still going to be an awesome upgrade I think.

...
As long as the D4 has a hard button reset functionality, the non-removable battery shouldn't be an issue for me since I never got in the habit of using spare batteries.
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On a leaked poster the hard reset says, "10-15 seconds" hold.

Two things:

1) Any long hold means the reset is a software controlled function. The major point of a battery pull is that you stop everything no matter what. A long press reset 'assume's the software will work - when my experience has been that software hangups are the biggest cause of battery pulls. I don't want to be left with twitchy software as the only thing that can turn itself off.

2) This thing we're holding in our hand is a real computer capable of a billion or more operations every second. It can delivery a whole website to your screen in a second or two. I don't want to have to imagine what's going on inside my squirrelly device during those "10-15 seconds" that I'm yelling, 'Shut down already!' at my phone. If you think "10-15 seconds" is trivial, hold your breath. Easy maybe, but NOT trivial.

So, for me, a quickly and safely removable battery is very much an issue. That D4 hardwired battery is probably a deal breaker.

Are you sure? On every PC I've owned, if Windows freezes or becomes unresponsive, holding the power button for 3+ seconds does a hardware shutdown, regardless of what's happening with the software. I'd imagine the D4 would work the same way?

Are you sure? On every PC I've owned, if Windows freezes or becomes unresponsive, holding the power button for 3+ seconds does a hardware shutdown, regardless of what's happening with the software. I'd imagine the D4 would work the same way?

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You are right that that's how it's designed to work. But hardware controls need special features to delay a process, like a time-delay fuse is a special design. Normal hardware switches just cut the power: NOW, and let the chips fall where they may. The OS must be able to pick up the pieces on restart.
So if it takes as much as a full second, at computer speeds, for the device to respond to the button press, then the button input is going back into the OS for processing. If the software is funky at that time... "unpredictable results".
If the time delay is very short and always the same, and it shuts down hard like a PC, maybe that's in the switch... "10-15 seconds"? No way!

The news of the Droid 4 kind of stung as it came as I was just getting used to the Droid 3. I think I might end up waiting to see if Motorola makes a phone that has a slide-out keyboard and an screen that has HD resolution. I don't think that Motorola will just let HTC (Rezound) and Google/Samsung (Galaxy Nexus) 1up them in the HD screen department like that.

My biggest concern is the bloatware. The amount that was on my Droid 2 wasn't too bad, but that phone was released in the summer of 2010 and Verizon has gotten downright ridiculous with it on most of the phones it has released since then.

My biggest concern is the bloatware. The amount that was on my Droid 2 wasn't too bad, but that phone was released in the summer of 2010 and Verizon has gotten downright ridiculous with it on most of the phones it has released since then.

Sent from my Incredible 2 using DroidForums

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In Verizon's defense, they did move to making some of the bloatware uninstallable, but point taken, it has grown to ridiculous proportions, specifically the V Cast apps.

And BTW, from the screenshots I've seen they've added even more bloatware than on the D3/Bionic/RAZR. It's one thing to want your customers to have the best possible experience, but it's another thing to unnecessarily dictate to your customer what have on their phone to get that experience by shoving it down their throats, hence like 98% (if not 100%)of their preinstalled apps can be found on Android Market.

The news of the Droid 4 kind of stung as it came as I was just getting used to the Droid 3. I think I might end up waiting to see if Motorola makes a phone that has a slide-out keyboard and an screen that has HD resolution. I don't think that Motorola will just let HTC (Rezound) and Google/Samsung (Galaxy Nexus) 1up them in the HD screen department like that.

Sent from my DROID3 using DroidForums

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It wouldn't surprise me if the summer release of a D5 were to have a 1.5g processor, the RAZRMAX housing and battery, with the 720p 4.5" display and the 13mp camera from the Chinese RAZR. Even quad cores and Jellybean(?)... nah.

And BTW, from the screenshots I've seen they've added even more bloatware than on the D3/Bionic/RAZR. It's one thing to want your customers to have the best possible experience, but it's another thing to unnecessarily dictate to your customer what have on their phone to get that experience by shoving it down their throats, hence like 98% (if not 100%)of their preinstalled apps can be found on Android Market.

Sent from my DROID3 using DroidForums

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It's paid advertising - like a pop-up on a website that won't go away. Blockbuster bought that space on your phone. Can't see vzw doing that out of the goodness of its heart.

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